Word: trivial
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...deplorable thing," he says, "is that young writers, too lazy to gather the facts themselves, sit around and sneer at all that is said. With the conference reeking of pseudosophisti-cation and half-baked cynicism, perspective inevitably becomes blurred. The result is an accenting of the negative and trivial story that obscures the truly important...
...always in a session's last days, there was a deluge of what Les Arends calls "the chaff and chicken feed." Last week the Congress had to deal with bills that covered such relatively trivial matters as the burgeoning birth rate of jellyfish, tariffs on imported bagpipes, a $450,000 appropriation to improve sanitation facilities for Wisconsin's Menominee Indians, a measure to conserve fur seals and protect sea otters...
Notions of this sort were popular in Britain a decade ago. As to the present British view of America, Mrs. Cooper describes it as follows: "American scholarship is condemned as prolix, overearnest and trivial. The only genuine art form is jazz, produced by an oppressed minority. Most Americans are bores; nice people, quite often, but boring nonetheless. A first degree from an American university is worthless; an American Ph.D. degree in any nonscientific subject is laughable...
...Insect. Some of Wertham's most provocative fire is directed at the clinical cult in literature and drama, in which human suffering is viewed with such detachment that it becomes trivial. The tone of John Mersey's Hiroshima and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood reduces violence almost to the level of natural catastrophes and impersonal acts, he says. The film The Collector, n which a young lepidopterist kidnaps a girl and keeps her locked up until she dies, is more than simply a sick parody of entomology: it adds to what Werham feels is the pervasive...
...series of "definitions" of alternative courses of action which the government might follow, along with arguments for and against each policy. The advantage of this format, according to Reston, is that it allows people to make a choice instead of simply receiving a deluge of facts, both important and trivial...